The present invention generally relates to telecommunication switching. More specifically, the present invention relates to a scalable switch fabric with quality-of-service (QoS) support.
Switch fabrics exists having a crossbar switch are known. Such crossbar switches typically use input queues and a centralized scheduler for configuring the crossbar. When a cell arrives at the switch fabric, it is placed in an input queue where it waits its turn to be transferred across the crossbar of the switch fabric. Thus, the centralized scheduler processes and schedules cells as they arrive at the switching fabric.
Such a known system, however, suffers the shortcoming that the rate at which received data needs to be processed corresponds to the rate at which the data is received. Said another way, the control path by which the data is processed has the same requirements as the data path by which the data is routed. Thus, the time available to process the data within the switching system is limited, particularly for higher switching speeds (i.e., higher throughput).